The Quatermass Xperiment (Hammer had changed the spelling to “Xperiment” to tie in with the expected X certificate) had originally been broadcast in six episodes on BBC television in 1953, the first of the three series concerning Professor Bernard Quatermass which were written for television between 1953 and 1960 by the extremely talented Manx writer, Nigel Kneale … The film retains moments of surprising power largely thanks to a tremendously impressive and pathetic performance from Richard Wordsworth in a Frankenstein-like role as the halfmonster. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the film when one sees it again today is how decisively the opening sequence (which was completely altered from the TV version) seems to record the intrusion of Hammer into the cosy middle-class domesticity of the British cinema. Two utterly conventional cinematic lovers run across a meadow mouthing their lines with precisely the kind of simpering coyness that had dogged British films through the 1940s and 1950s … They giggle and embrace stiffly on a convenient haystack when suddenly the whole scene is interrupted by a terrible whining noise … the couple stagger to their feet and begin to run in complete disarray back across the field to take refuge in a hut. As they cringe in terror, a huge tubular rocket ship … plunges through the sky into the field exactly at the point where they have been lying. It would be difficult to conceive of a more symbolic or appropriate beginning for Hammer’s eruption into the British film scene in the late 1950s. The Quatermass Xperiment, being the first Hammer monster film, also proved to be an excellent demonstration of Phil Leakey’s brilliance with make-up … His work on Richard Wordsworth manage to convey the sense of a whole body in the process of decomposition in a way that was more subtle than gruesome and greatly enhances Wordsworth’s own tragic mime … The figure of Victor in The Quatermass Xperiment, limping miserably over a bomb-site … undoubtedly amounts to one of the most pathetic monster that Hammer has ever created.

David Pirie,A Heritage of Horror, The Gordon Fraser Gallery, London- Bedford 1974